Showing results by author "james johnson" in All Categories

Leonardo takes you inside the brain of a man who painted the most famous face on Earth, sketched helicopters in the 1400s, dissected corpses to understand beauty, and wrote in mirrored code while inventing robots no one would build for centuries. He didn’t separate art and science. He didn’t follow disciplines. He followed truth. And he left behind a world forever warped by the intensity of his attention.

The Mirage: How Saudi Arabia Built a Gas Station Empire is a sharp, unsettling deep-dive into how one royal family turned a desert into a kingdom, an oil company into a superpower, and a religious movement into a global firewall. This is not ancient history — it all started in the 20th century. Through brutal conquest, British backing, American oil deals, and decades of carefully manufactured silence, the House of Saud built something that looks like a country… but behaves like a brand.

Biology 101: A History of Life is the story of how humans discovered life from the outside in. Poking, slicing, sketching, sequencing, and arguing our way toward understanding what it means to be alive. From Aristotle’s animal lists to Darwin’s dangerous idea. From Mendel’s peas to the human genome. From hand-ground glass to CRISPR gene editing. This is not a textbook. It’s a history of discovery. The brilliant, chaotic, often accidental process that turned biology from folklore into code.

He never stopped drawing. Not even when the world told him to grow up. Tim Burton didn’t try to fit in — he turned his alienation into art. From the suburban shadows of Burbank to the soundstages of Hollywood, he built an empire of monsters, misfits, and melancholy hearts.

Andrew Jackson: The Republic’s Iron Fist traces the full arc of one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history. From his muddy birth on the Carolina frontier to the battlefield at New Orleans, from the dueling grounds of Tennessee to the Oval Office, Jackson’s life was war—and he never stopped swinging. This audiobook doesn’t glorify. It doesn’t condemn.

What is color? Not just pigment. Not just light. Not even just perception. Color is a system. A language written in wavelengths, built by biology, shaped by culture, and weaponized by power. From ancient dyes to modern marketing, from the psychology of red to the physics of violet, COLOR is a vibrant walk through everything we think we see… and everything we’ve been trained to feel. Explore how the brain edits the spectrum, how flags and uniforms manipulate emotion, how art history is lined with poison, and why no one saw “blue” until they invented a word for it. This is not a book about art.

What do apples, atoms, black holes, and time machines all have in common? They all follow the same rules, the laws of physics. Physics 101 is is a fast-paced, story-driven walkthrough of how we figured out the rules that govern reality. From ancient thinkers dropping guesses to modern geniuses dropping equations, this book tracks the wild, mind-bending history of motion, matter, energy, and everything in between.

Lobbied: How They Bought the Government is a brutal exposé of the real power behind American politics. From Big Pharma to Big Oil, weapons manufacturers to food conglomerates, this book shows how corporations and special interests didn’t just bend the rules, they wrote them. With billions spent on lobbying every year, legislation isn’t made, it’s purchased. Behind closed doors. With checks, access, and influence you’ll never have. This isn’t just about backroom deals in Washington. It’s your insulin prices. Your student debt. Your rent. Your food. Your vote. And your future.

COLUMBUS: The Man Who Didn’t Discover America is a clear-eyed biography of one of history’s most mythologized figures. Drawing from primary sources, letters, and eyewitness accounts, this book traces the life and legacy of Christopher Columbus. From his early years in Genoa to his final voyage across the Atlantic. Rather than retelling the story through rose-colored legend, the book offers a grounded account of who Columbus actually was, what he believed, and what happened when he made landfall in the Caribbean.

Life didn’t begin with a roar. It began with goo. Before brains, bones, bugs, or breathing, Earth was just a soup of chemicals getting zapped by lightning until something clicked. This is the story of what happened next. From the first self-replicating molecule to the rise of humans with god complexes, From Goo to You is a ride through four billion years of biology. The true story of how atoms turned into cells, cells turned into creatures, and creatures started asking, "What even is life?"

This isn’t a memoir. It’s not a miracle cure. And it’s not another promise built on fear. This is the book that finally explains it, all of it. What it is. How it works. Why it’s so hard to treat. What the treatments actually do. What the diagnosis does to your mind. And how the system around it got so big, so expensive, and so confusing. It’s biology. It’s industry. It’s psychology. It’s the full picture, from rogue cells to medical machines to the moment your life gets split in half by one word.

From sacred ceremony to cigarette ads, from opioid pills to infinite scroll, Addiction: The Habit That Runs the World traces the full timeline of how craving became a system and how that system became modern life. This is not a recovery memoir. This is not a clinical manual. This is a walk through the architecture of addiction. How it was built, scaled, sold, and normalized. From the opium wars and plantation sugar to vaping teens and dopamine apps, this book shows how every empire found its fix, and how every generation got hooked.

BUILT FROM BURGERS is a clear, sharp, and wildly listenable walkthrough of how life actually works. From DNA to digestion, from cell division to consciousness. No fluff. No filler. Just the full biological blueprint of you, explained molecule by molecule. This isn’t a textbook. It’s a systems manual. Inside, you’ll learn how your body builds itself from atoms, why proteins do everything, how cells specialize, how your brain talks to your gut, and what happens when it all breaks down.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

Stephen Hawking was supposed to be dead by 23. Diagnosed with ALS at Cambridge and given just two years to live, he lost his voice, his mobility, and nearly every physical function — but never his fire. Instead of fading, he rewrote the universe. From black holes to Big Bangs, radiation to multiverses, Hawking transformed modern physics with a single cheek muscle and a voice made of code. He became the most famous scientist alive — not just for what he survived, but for what he discovered.

TAYLOR SWIFT: The Making of a Pop Machine is the real story of how a Pennsylvania girl with a dream became a billion-dollar brand, a streaming superpower, and the most influential artist of her generation. From country roots to stadium dominance. From Kanye interruptions to ten-minute revenge ballads. From Big Machine drama to legal warfare with Taylor’s Versions. From sad songs to supply chains. This isn’t just a pop star biography. It’s a business case study, a cultural timeline, and a reminder that no one weaponized heartbreak better than Taylor Swift.

Thanksgiving is one of America’s oldest traditions — but the story we tell about it is mostly myth. Thanks, But No Thanks walks through the real origins of the holiday, from the Indigenous nations who lived here long before the Pilgrims arrived, to the 1621 harvest feast, to the centuries of change that shaped Thanksgiving into what it is today. Along the way, it explores the wars, treaties, proclamations, school plays, family rituals, and cultural rewrites that turned a single event into a national tradition.

In this volume we collect together poets who, by the difference in the colour of their skin, were treated with such disdain and racism that it is difficult to believe that poetry of such tenderness, beauty and authority could exist.

JEFFERSON: The Man Who Owned the Dream is a sharp biography of America’s third president—not as a myth, not as a monument, but as a man. From the pen that drafted the Declaration to the plantation that paid his bills, this book traces Thomas Jefferson’s full arc without apology, spin, or blind hero worship. You’ll see the Enlightenment thinker. The political operator. The architect of Monticello. The author of liberty. The father of enslaved children. And the man who helped design a system built to break itself. No sermons. No soft gloves. Just the facts and the fallout.

Alcohol: How Booze Built the World is a deep dive into the liquid that shaped civilization—and occasionally ruined your weekend. From ancient mead and divine wine to frat party keg stands and $300 celebrity tequilas, this book uncorks the full story of alcohol: what it is, how it works, and why humans keep coming back for another round. It’s not an intervention. It’s a mirror. Whether you drink nightly, socially, occasionally, or not at all, Alcohol is a clear-eyed, unfiltered look at the world’s favorite substance—and the rituals, memories, mistakes, and meanings we’ve poured into it.